Donald Trump is the Worst President of All Time

And I will prove it.

Even in the always-chaotic world of modern American politics, there are still two things that one can hold onto with absolute certainty. The first is that every presidential election, no matter the context, will be described during the campaign as the most important election of our lifetimes. The second is that the candidate elected afterwards will be described by their opponents as the worst president in U.S. history. But there used to be a third one: that, once they are made, both of these declarations will be written off as laughable partisan hysteria by “serious” political observers, who will then make a point out of declaring their trust in the wisdom of the American people.

It was only during the age of Donald Trump that this third certainty ended. In a way that they did not do for Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, or any other president in memory, the academics and historians of Trump 1.0 entered the fray very early on to loudly concur with the sitting president’s opponents in their declarations that he was one of the worst to ever hold the office. When the very first survey of presidential historians to include Trump was published in February 2018, it already had him billed as the worst president of all time after just one year in office. Subsequent surveys have been just as bad. If those who study these things for a living are concerned, Rachel Maddow and your liberal uncle are right about everything.

For those of us on the left, it was very easy to dismiss these arguments out of hand as pearl-clutching hysteria. In fact, doing so was the only valid reaction available at the time. Back when Trump was a largely ineffective and unpopular one-term president, the argument that he was already substantially worse than the historical villains of America’s past could only be described as historical ignorance at best and nefarious whitewashing at worst. For a time, it was even possible to argue that his administration might have been a long-term net benefit for the country, if only in how it decreased the popularity and effectiveness of his always-malignant Republican Party.

This is no longer possible to argue now. By winning a second term with a trifecta, Trump has thoroughly proven that he is not a fluke nor an indirect benefit to the forces of progress. And after just eight months of unfettered power, he has dismantled even the most cautious arguments that he is not as bad as the worst of his hard-right predecessors on the merits. Every potentially positive populist promise he ever made has been thrown into the trash, while all of the noxious elements of Reaganite conservatism he was said to have repudiated have returned in full force. He has been unprecedentedly, openly corrupt and declared war on the most basic functions of the state out of a desire for absolute power and a childish obsession with petty grudges. Even the word “destructive” doesn’t begin to describe it. All told, his agenda is best described as slow-motion national suicide.

For me, this is enough to overcome the fear of coming across as a cringe lib and say what many on my side have avoided saying: that Donald Trump is genuinely, seriously, the worst president in the history of the United States of America. But unlike others who have wantonly made this claim over the past eight years, I will actually substantiate it. Below, I have assembled a list of the top five presidents with the best claims to be the worst of all time. I will go through them all, and I will prove that Trump, even this early on in his second term, is worse than all of them—including the one you’re thinking of right now.

Contender #1: Ronald Reagan